[lolinder]

Neither case is a purely technical shortcoming—in both the case of facial recognition algorithms performing poorly on dark skin and the case of Gemini refusing to produce images of white people, the technology works that way because of the priorities of the people developing the software, and we can derive the developers' priorities from the software's limitations.

A piece of facial recognition software that doesn't do well with dark skin shows that the team that built it either didn't think to test it on dark skin or didn't feel it was important to get dark skin working before release.

An image generation model that both doesn't produce images of white people spontaneously and will actively refuse to do so when asked shows that the team that built it either failed to ever ask it to produce images of white people or believed that it was a good thing for their model to refuse to produce such images.

In neither case is the problem purely technical.